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South Africa

The stove was developed by Adrian Padt and Aidan Oosthuysen, and Richard Pocock, and uses a familiar Rocket design surrounded by a wire cage to improve the stove's stability and reduce burns. It's a smart looking stove, it saves women time and energy in gathering firewood, and it has lower emissions than the solutions it is typically replacing.

A Geyser, is a hot water heater in South Africa. There are many houses that are not connected to conventional utility grids, and heating water with electricity and natural gas is expansive and/or impractical.

Tankless, batch hot water heaters directly connected to the shower etc, are a great single-use application for an efficient stoves.

The Sustainable energy Technology and Research (SeTAR) Centre is a multi-disciplinary research facility that operates under the aegis of the Faculty of Science at the University of Johannesburg. The SeTAR Centre was formally launched in March 2010. The centre is housed in a cottage within the University of Johannesburg Research Village on the Bunting Road Campus, with dedicated office space and a testing laboratory in the basement of the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA) building.

The SeTAR Centre is engaged on research programmes that focus on energy poverty in both rural and urban areas of South Africa; the role that energy has to play in climate protection in the sustainability of a megacity (Gauteng); the public understanding of science; and networking on energy issues in the Africa region. The SeTAR Centre provides research facilities for energy studies for masters and doctoral students through its affiliation with the Department of Geography, Environmental Management and Energy Studies (GEMES) in the Faculty of Science.

One of the Research Programs is the Basic Energy Programme

The programme focuses on energy poverty and acts as an innovation hub for the development of basic energy solutions for cooking, heating, lighting and productive use for the low income communities. Services and research streams include:
Testing Laboratory: SeTAR centre has a fully equipped basic energy testing laboratory for use as part of research activities or on a fee-for-service basis. The centre has advanced equipment and automated systems to ensure all tests are carried out satisfactorily and competently. The SeTAR centre was commissioned to characterize thermal efficiency and gaseous emissions of a variety of fuel/stove combinations. In the process of evaluating these stoves, the research staff have also been engaged in the development of written procedures, leading to the Heterogeneous stove Testing Protocol (HTP).

BP has taken a life-cycle approach, starting with the consumer need, through to regulatory and HSE assessment in the case of BP Arivi. BP Arivi is a low-sulphur paraffin fuel for domestic cooking, providing consumers with access to an affordable, high-value fuel, in safe and child-resistant packaging. Different options were considered to determine the most appropriate fuel to meet the needs of consumers and scrutiny of the supply chain was undertaken to identify key risks We are now commercially piloting this solution in the market in South Africa and there will be further iterations around the process. (Websitewww.myarivi.com)

At ETHOS 2009 we held a panel on stove safety, bringing in viewpoints from corporate standards development, national standards certification, and small to medium scale developers. The team led by Nathan Johnson (Iowa State University) included Crispin Pemberton-Pigott (New Dawn Engineering), Casper Thijssen (Philips), and Karabi Dutta.

We determined that each type of industry has a different perspective that influences their path or actions towards a safer stove. And that all sub-industries may not produce safer stoves given the same incentive mechanisms or policies. As such more than one path to safety may be needed to reach the greatest amount of end-users (and producers). The panel ended the discussion with an overview present work in stove safety with recommendations for next steps.

Please view the attached file for more details. I will be leading a group in 2009 to work on the following: assemble database of injury data, b) analyze incentive mechanisms, cost/ benefit, c) development of lab testing procedures for different stove categories, d) publication of findings/ results, and e) look for partnerships with international agencies to support safer stove design and production.

Please contact me if you have any questions. There will be more updates to follow. Best,
Nathan Johnsonatlas@iastate.edu
PhD Candidate, Mechanical Engineering, International Development
Iowa State University

Steam boiler: Operates on wood or other solid fuels or liquid gas. Steam-injected pressure -cooking can be 10 times more fuel efficient than traditional open fire cooking and more efficient than improved stove-design cooking. Water is heated in an inner chamber and the resulting steam is re-heated in a tube, creating a “superheated steam” that is much hotter than regular steam. The steam is then fed into the cooker. The boiler is inexpensive to build, safe, and can be taken apart for cleaning, which is critical since most boilers accumulate scale on their inner shells and eventually fail.